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East London meets Findhorn

There is a vibrant good news story doing the rounds this week, in the shape of 24 school kids from the Rokeby School in Newham, East London and their deputy-head teacher, Willie Deighan. The story has its roots in a conference we hosted here in September last year with the title (appropriately given the solutions-based nature of what we are about), What Schools are Doing Right. Willie was a participant at that conference and left enthused at many of the positive approaches promoted.

How, he wondered, could these be applied in the context of Rokeby School? The school was not short of problems. It had a reputation as a rough school and for various reasons, ‘Special Measures’ – shorthand for new targets to be achieved urgently to avoid closure – had been imposed. The entire management team had recently been replaced.

Well, perhaps surprisingly, the positive methods learned at the Findhorn conference had an immediate effect. Recently appointed as deputy-head, Willie took on responsibility for developing a new ethos to improve the quality of the students’ unstructured time and specifically for addressing the perennial problem of bullying.

Rather than focussing on the problem, he introduced a method learned at Findhorn called Appreciative Inquiry – a planning tool based not on identifying problems that need solving, as in most conventional approaches, but rather on positive previous experience that can be built upon. The word that kept on coming up in the consultation with the students was ‘respect’ – they wanted more respect than they felt they were getting.

So, the ‘problem’ of bullying was reframed as the opportunity to request more respect. Definitions were sought of just what the students and staff meant by respect and these were synthesised into six core principles that are now posted on the school’s notice boards. In parallel, the students started studying and developing a taste for non-violent communication, another tool gleaned from the What are Schools Doing Right conference that aims at promoting more self-aware and responsible ways of relating.

A school leadership council has now been elected, with two representatives from each form, and this is playing a leading role in providing student input into the design of the new school that is to be built within the next three years. Even if they are not entirely clear what it means, the students do know they want it to be an ‘eco-school’.

Willie suggested the possibility of visiting a community that works with Appreciative Inquiry. One that attempts to integrate non-violent communication into the fabric of its operations and that is a good working model of an educational campus with sustainable design at its heart. And so, the idea of coming to spend some time at Findhorn was born.

There was still the small matter of raising the funding to make it all possible. In the event, the students exceeded their wildest dreams in raising £7,500 from the Newham Youth Parliament and a further £15,000 from the educational organisation, London Challenge.

So now they are here – 24 kids between the ages of 12 and 15 from a diverse array of ethnic backgrounds – engaged in educational sessions from 9.00am to 9.30pm every day for a week. They are studying non-violent communication techniques, making visits to local schools, studying how the various eco-technologies about the place operate and joining the teams in our own work departments..

One might have thought that these urban youngsters would stick out in such an alien environment – a good number have never been out of East London before. But they generally seem to feel at ease and are a comfortable, if somewhat unusual presence about the place. We people truly are less different from each other than we are sometimes inclined to believe.

The students’ time is now almost up – they leave on Saturday morning. The process of sharing what they have learned here begins almost immediately – the young people will be involved in training students from other schools in Newham in a little over a week.

It is a wonderful opportunity on so many levels for the community to host this kind of group. It helps us remain relevant to the needs of a multicultural 21st century Britain. It provides a great opportunity for us to exercise our privilege in service to something larger than ourselves. On a personal note, I find it deeply comforting that a community that is so nurturing to middle-aged, middle-class white people like me can also enthuse and inspire others that clearly do not fit this profile.

As the baby-boomers move into late middle-age, the perennial danger for ecovillages is that they become comfortable New Age, old-people’s homes. Weeks like this help keep us relevant.

Jonathan Dawson is a sustainability educator based at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland. He is seeking to weave some of the wisdom accrued in 20 years of working in Africa into more sustainable and joyful ways of living here in Europe. Jonathan is also a gardener and a story-teller and is President of the Global Ecovillage Network.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.